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Java 6 to be supported till Feb 2013

Oracle has announced a further extension to Java 6's already extended end of life date. Originally planned for July 2012, Oracle had previously pushed back the end-of-life date for supplying updates to Java 6 to November 2012 to allow more time for the transition to Java 7. Now, that end of life has been postponed until February 2013. The announcement was made in a blog post by Henrik Stahl, Oracle's Senior Director of Product Management, who said the decision was made after "further consultation and consideration".

This will mean that there will be a final publicly released Oracle JDK 6 in February 2013 and then users will either need a JDK or Java SE support contract through My Oracle Support for further updates. Oracle are also keeping previous versions of Java 6 available in the Java Archive, but do not recommend production use of these versions.

Oracle is in the process of trying to establish a "two year cadence" for major Java releases and is planning to work to rules which will see support of Java SE releases until three years after a major release, one year after a subsequent major release or six months after a subsequent major release has been made the default JRE. The support roadmap for Java has already been updated with the new maps. For those planning ahead, public updates for Java 7 are scheduled to end in July 2014.